RUSSIA'S & CHINA'S SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA

New Year’s Eve was a slow news night. You could tell because a story about Africa was the BBC lead item.  It sounded a bit like Schadenfreude: the Ivory Coast and Senegal had told their longstanding French garrisons, in the nicest possible way, to pack up and go home. Both countries have important economic links with France.  French troops had previously been told to leave Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali where they had been fighting jihadists.  An opportunity not to be missed.

During Prime Minister John Major’s entente cordiale with President Chirac in 1995, I attended a joint meeting on Africa, not much publicized, held in Paris.   Apart from the fabulous, ever more sumptuous connecting rooms,  ornate Louis XV furniture, and some threatening chandeliers – the venue was the Elyseé Palace – the most notable feature was a difference between the delegations.  We Brits were a motley crew of anthropologists, NGO-bodies involved in international development, civil servants from FCO and DfID (now absorbed by the Foreign Office), plus the odd intelligence officer.  The French partially matched these, but, pursuing their own priorities, fielded an impressive array of  military figures. The colonial Tirailleurs Sénégalais formed in 1857 who fought on the Western Front during the First World War reflect a long and deep relationship.  The expulsion of the French armed forces from West Africa is an historic blow to President Macron who cherishes his role in international affairs.
 
The expulsion of the French was also a significant sign of the times.  The Russians’ arms-length mercenaries, the Wagner group, moved into the Central African Republic in 2017 where they brokered a peace agreement between the warring factions - which later fell apart.  In North Africa after the fall of Gaddafi, they began operating with ‘Marshal’ Khalifa Haftar’s militia in Benghazi, Libya, in 2018.   Support of West African military juntas came next beginning in 2021 with Mali in where in 2022 they contributed to the execution in the Mopti region of some 500 people by the Malian armed forces. Then in 2024 Wagner was invited into Burkina Faso and Niger.  Wagner, recently renamed the Africa Corps, is now under the Russian Ministry of Defense.  Africa is becoming a Syria-substitute playground for Russia and Putin.
   
The Mali story is extraordinary.   The towns of Timbuktu and Gao are on the desert-edge in the Bilad-al-Sudan (from the medieval ‘land of the blacks’) that extends east as far as Darfur in Sudan.  They are major targets for jihadist Al-Qaeda and ISIS linked groups and so in turn targets for the Wagner group.  In Mali’s North-East Tinzaouten province abutting the Algerian border, a separatist coalition of nomadic Tuareg has on occasion been aligned with jihadists against the junta forces. The Tuareg are known as horsemen and cattle herders whose men famously wear a face-covering. They suffer particularly from the climate induced encroachment of the Sahara.  Le Monde has been reporting on Ukraine’s support for the Tuareg coalition against the  Russian mercenaries.  In July 2024, 84 Russians and 47 Malians were reported killed in an Tuareg attack involving light quadcopter drones supplied allegedly – Kyiv denies this – by Ukraine. Well, my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

A further chapter in the Scramble for Africa has opened.  This time it’s  Russia and China.  There is something almost fitting that the two vast militarized authoritarian giants wish to engage with more or less militarized, authoritarian regimes in Africa.  From Grozny to Gao jihadism is a menace, and from Beijing to Bamako railways and infrastructure are basic to economic progress.   Russia and China seek Africa’s rare minerals and metals, gold and diamonds, cashew nuts and cocoa.  Gold remains a lure.  It is estimated that Russia has been taking out £1 billion worth of gold each year from African countries.  The Wagner mercenaries took over a gold mine in Mali only last year.

Everything in the West African garden wasn’t lovely before the new arrivals (the Chinese not so new).  The northern borders of these West African states are highly permeable to people, weapons and smuggled goods.  Travel north west from Maroua in Cameroon, you aren’t far from Maiduguri in Nigeria, birthplace in 2009 of militant Boko Haram which forged links with ISIS and, in 2015,  sought to form a Caliphate.  Travel north east to the capital of Chad, N’Djamena, and you go through territory infested with militia of the Islamic State in West Africa, and the remains of Boko Haram. Go south you have miles of border with Nigeria, a smugglers paradise for vehicles and  arms.  And since 2018 there has been a debilitating civil war in Cameroon.

Failure both to alleviate poverty and command the confidence of citizens are contributory causes of jihadism.  The high-flown titles of such armed groups can give a false impression.  The foot soldiers of such militias have little knowledge of Shari’a and the Qur’an.  They are in the employ of better educated jihadists, given a Kalashnikov, earn a living and eventually can pay the bride-price for a wife.  The corruption in African States, the siphoning off of national wealth, the absence of reward  for competence and merit, is not news to their citizens.  I was being driven south from Makeni to Freetown in Sierra Leone and noticed a new railway running parallel with the road ….  “Where does that go”, I asked the driver.  “Beijing” he replied.  I could see him grinning in the rear-view mirror.
 
Neither Russia nor China are particularly bothered by the high level of corruption in sub-Saharan Africa.  Russia’s kleptocrats would find it amateurish.  Transparency International’s  Corruption Perception Index is a standard measure of public sector corrupt practice.  The lower the score the higher the corruption.  Denmark does best with 90.  But 44 out of 49 sub-Saharan African countries  score below 50.  Nigeria gets 24, Cote d’Ivoire with 40. Botswana, something of a worthy exception at 60.  To Russia and China  diplomatic support, for example at the UN, and valuable, often scarce, commodities, are what matters from client states. 

In the face of the deteriorating situation in West Afrika, and economic pressures in Europe, not a great deal is currently to be expected from either the UK and the EU.  It is true that since 2015, there have been British troops training the Nigerian army, and personnel advising on counter-terrorism in North-East Nigeria, the Chad Basin and Cameroon in response to the ISIS threat in the region.  There has also been some police training.   But both the EU and UK, by cutting spending on Aid, are simultaneously undermining their own soft power and  weakening the challenge to poverty.   A great deal of the  UK Aid budget is now diverted from poverty reduction abroad to covering the cost of asylum seekers in UK,  including hotel accommodation, or on stimulating and facilitating trade.  This as climate change brings ever severer immiseration to millions.

The current, declining, birth rate in Africa is 31 per 1,000 people.  Though, the UN estimates, there will be 2.5 billion Africans by 2050, making up a quarter of the world’s population.  There is need to focus a little creative attention and action on this great continent beyond Schadenfreude at France’s reverses. ‘Waging Peace, Fighting Disease and Building Hope’ - the Motto of the Carter Center in Atlanta, founded by the late President, would be a good start.


See TheArticle 06/01/2025